We let down younger people. We thought that relying on Tony Blair's charisma was enough, says Peter Mandelson in the Guardian.
I had my head shot off by all sides when, in the leadership election, I expressed a view on Labour's direction. Plus ça change. But the leadership has been decided and Ed Miliband should be given space to lead the party alongside the new generation of Labour politicians. I want them to succeed.
If they are wise, that generation will learn from the past. Before this year's election we lost touch with the electorate. The world had moved on from the mid-90s New Labour mantras. But also we lost New Labour's ability to speak the language of fairness to a squeezed "middle Britain". The public found it harder to understand what a vote for New Labour meant any more.
But it is not New Labour's successes and failures in government that currently concern me: it is what happens to it as a political force. We who created New Labour need to be far more self-critical. We did not do enough when we had the chance to put down strong enough New Labour roots.
Tony Blair's successor as Sedgefield MP, Phil Wilson, has lamented that we were elected on 1 May 1997 and serious attempts at party reform stopped on 2 May. He is right. We went off to government and only returned to the party when it came to election time, and then fleetingly. We lost sight of one of the bitter lessons we had learnt in those wilderness years in opposition: a party that loses the willingness constantly to reform itself loses the capacity to renew itself.
Take the system for electing the leader. Some have bemoaned the fact that David Miliband was ahead among party members and MPs but lost out because of , the largest slice from Unite. Imagine if in 2007, when we were still in government, there had been a contest rather than a coronation and we had conducted this according to our current rules with a similar outcome to the one two weeks ago. We would have been choosing a Labour prime minister on the back of a poll of a small minority of union members. I very much doubt if the country would have worn that. But these were the rules of the game and Ed won by them. If they were wrong, we should have changed the system when we had the chance.
It is a similar story with the method of appointing the shadow cabinet. That the new Labour leader does not have the freedom to assemble his team from the widest talent pool is an absurdity. Would Sir Alex Ferguson allow his squad to pick the Man United team among themselves before each game? Labour prime ministers don't have cabinets elected in that way: so by what logic should the shadow cabinet?
Which brings me to my last point: the failure, within the party, of New Labour to organise, mobilise and renew. We used fear of being accused of factionalism as the excuse. But the real reason is that we enjoyed government too much, from the prime minister down. The Labour Party of 2010 is thankfully a completely different animal to that which only narrowly elected Denis Healey to the deputy leadership over Tony Benn in 1981. But in government New Labour was nevertheless too lazy in putting energy into keeping alive reform and renewal in the party.
Too often we in New Labour thought that the mixture of being in the right policy position, uttering the right language and relying on Tony's charisma was enough. It was as if we felt the nitty gritty of organising at the grassroots was somehow beneath us.
We were also too overbearing towards those who wanted quite legitimately to question or debate issues of policy or strategy and were pushed, partly as a result, into the arms of those who had always wanted to strangle New Labour at birth. We let down younger people in our party who share New Labour instincts but who we did not encourage and bring on in the way that we should have. As a consequence, their voice was not really heard in the leadership election, and the views of my generation were easily and cynically dismissed as voices of the past. The New Labour argument was thus effectively disabled.
The question now is if the sustained electoral success we enjoyed over 13 years will go down as an aberration, an exceptional period in our history, or the opening chapter of a series of New Labour governments dedicated to economic competence and social justice, to the right balance between markets and the state, both reformed in the public interest.
I am not without hope. Party members retain an appetite for the tough choices of government, whether in striking the right balance between crime and civil liberties, or being honest about the need for spending cuts. This is not the party bent on its own destruction that it was when I started to make my way in it after the 1979 election defeat. And a talented new generation wants to build on this first era of New Labour and create and shape its own, different New Labour era. The baton has been passed.
